How To: Remove cloud-init from Ubuntu Server Linux

Ubuntu Server Linux comes with cloud-init “out of the box”, starting back from their 18.04 release.

For more information, see: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CloudInit

If you don’t need cloud-init though, if you’re running an on-premises server for example, then you might not need or want to have cloud-init installed.

To remove cloud-init from your Ubuntu Server Linux installation, run:

sudo apt purge cloud-init -y

To reboot after removing cloud-init, run:

sudo reboot

Clean up after rebooting, run:

sudo rm -rf /etc/cloud && sudo rm -rf /var/lib/cloud/

Tested on Ubuntu Server Linux 22.04.1